Isabelle Backouche. La trace du fleuve. La Seine et Paris (1750-1850). Paris: Editions de l’Ecole
des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 2000. 430 pp. (paper), ISBN 978-2-7132-1351-9.
Reviewed by David Garrioch (School of Historical Studies, Monash University, Australia 3800)
Published on H-Urban (May, 2001)
The Seine and Paris: what a wonderful subject! An
opportunity to take a slice through the life of the city,
just as the river itself flows through the centre of Paris.
To examine the city from a new angle, at once as a whole
and from a particular perspective. And to reach a wide
public, for it is a subject that catches the imagination. To
be done effectively and comprehensively, it requires very
diverse skills: those of the economic historian, for the
Seine was central to the provisioning of Paris and to its
economy; those of the social historian, alert to the daily
life of the water and its banks and bridges; those of the art
historian, to interpret visual representations of the river;
skills of the urban geographer, able to place human activity in its physical context. Not least, the topic requires
considerable research ability, because it cuts across conventional divisions of source material, not least if one
is brave enough–as Isabelle Backouche has been–to traverse the great divide of 1789, and even more to venture
across the first half of the nineteenth century when the
sources are far harder to track down amid changing administrations and in territory less well trodden by historians. This book in some ways exceeded my expectations;
in other respects, perhaps inevitably given the scale of
the undertaking, I was disappointed.
Hall, the central hospital, the cathedral, the main courts,
prisons, and police administration, the Louvre, the Arsenal, and more. It was a site for festivities, fireworks and
displays. It was a crowded commercial space: places on
the banks were in demand by merchants unloading and
selling different sorts of produce, but also by the riverside activities of dyers, butchers, and leather-dressers.
People lived and worked in houses built on the bridges
and banks, literally overhanging the water. Shopkeepers
and artisans competed with hawkers and stalls for spaces
on the bridges and ports that were among the most frequented and hence commercially valuable in Paris. The
water-carriers too demanded access to the water, and so
did the laundrywomen-there were up to 2000 places on
the laundry-boats in 1737 (p. 33). On the river itself there
was insufficient room for all the barges, passenger craft,
the wood trains, the floating mills, the laundry boats, and
the increasing numbers of bathing establishments.
After about 1750, Backouche suggests, the city authorities became far more proactive, planning and shaping the river space in ways that were to transform the relationships between the city and the Seine. The most dramatic manifestation of the new approach was the global
scheme for the refurbishment of the river banks that
The time frame, 1750 to 1850, is unusual, and at first was developed primarily by the head of the Municipalglance looks arbitrarily chosen. In reality, Backouche ity, Viarmes, and the city architect Moreau-Desproux.
covers a longer period, and the opening date might well Obtaining royal approval in 1769, it was the first genhave been 1700. Yet 1750 makes sense as a starting point eral plan for the future development of the city and anbecause that decade and the following one marked a sig- ticipated that of the Commission des Artistes of 1796,
nificant turning-point in official attitudes towards the which has generally been credited as the earliest such atriver and its uses. Until then, the Paris Municipality had tempt. And unlike the later plan, the 1769 scheme was
attempted simply to balance competing uses of the river, very largely implemented, despite the financial difficulaccommodating all to a greater or lesser extent. The Seine ties both of the monarchy and of the City of Paris. It
was both water supply and waste disposal, and its banks envisaged the destruction of the houses on the bridges
bore an astonishing weight of public buildings: the City and river banks–over 500 of them–the construction of a
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series of stone quais, and the widening and paving of all gradual development, over a long period, of an export
the adjoining areas. The financial and social costs were trade. There are many other insights: Backouche points
huge.
to the growing role of engineers, who by the 1840s were
firmly in control of the river, displacing merchants and
Backouche tells this story in detail. She explains the even the architects who had formerly played an imporways in which the 1769 plan departed from previous us- tant part. Just occasionally, Backouche presents as pecuages and earlier projects, and places it in the context of
liar to the Seine and its administration developments that
the multifarious urban reform projects of the 1770s and
were taking place in the city more broadly. But for a his1780s. It implied an overall vision for the city centre, torian of Paris, there are discussions of many minor and
contrasting with the former piecemeal approach to prac- little-known aspects of the city’s history, from the floods
tical problems. It attempted to beautify the city, at the of 1740 through to the administration of the Samaritaine
same time facilitating the commercial uses of the river pump, the socio-economic composition of the population
and meeting the growing demand to be able to move
living on the bridges, and the debates over steam pumps.
freely around and across the city: the river and its enThe book is abundantly illustrated, and many of the maps,
virons represented a major bottleneck. And it repre- in particular, are very interesting
sented a clear decision to privilege traffic-both fluvial and
road-based-over the multiple uses of the river as a living
Nevertheless, this is primarily a history of urbanism.
space. It gave priority to a newly-imagined ’public inter- Having evoked the multifarious and competing river acest’, over the ’private interests’ represented by individual tivities in the first section, and except for a section on
merchants and riverside establishments. The debates and the struggles for compensation by tenants and owners
resistance surrounding the new approach provide a win- of houses demolished in the 1780s, Backouche focusses
dow onto competing ways of thinking about the river and firmly on projects and plans and there is little more on
the city as a whole and onto the political life of Paris in river life. While this fits in with the overall argument that
the late eighteenth century.
such activities were increasingly sidelined, it exaggerates
the speed at which the process took place. There were as
The second date, 1850, also makes perfect sense in many laundry-boats in 1805 as there were in 1723, we
terms of the history of the river. If the 1820s saw the most
learn in an aside (p. 319). Furthermore, they went on
intensive canal building, and hence diminished the imbeing centres of festive and community life: Alain Faure
portance of the Seine in the life of the city, the 1840s wit- has described their role in Carnival celebrations of the
nessed the coming of the railway and the massive trans- first half of the nineteenth century.[1] The water carriers
fer of freight from water to land. By then, the process of remained into the second half of the nineteenth century.
making the river into a highway was virtually complete. The riverside lodging houses and their shifting populaThe retail traders had been removed from the river banks
tions were still there in the 1840s.
and pushed into specially designed covered markets elsewhere in the city. The floating mills had gone, the numI was disappointed that some attention was not given
ber of laundry boats was declining rapidly, the key ports to aesthetic appreciations of the river. Although Backhad been transferred away from the city centre, and the ouche refers to plans designed to beautify the river banks,
high quais turned the river itself into a canal. The pro- the dramatic shift in the way educated people began to
cess that began in the middle decades of the eighteenth think about landscape, rivers, and cities in the second half
century was now complete.
of the eighteenth century is not acknowledged.[2] Some
attention to aesthetic considerations might also lead one
The research underlying all of this is very impresto question the assertion that the Seine ’loses its power
sive, and the general argument is amply substantiated. of attraction for Parisian society’ (p. 263). One has only
There are a great many observations made along the way to read Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s celebration of the river
that shed light on little-known aspects of the history of views available after the demolition of the houses on the
Paris during this period. The activity of the Old Regime bridges to suspect that for many Parisians the Seine exMunicipality, in particular, has been neglected by histoerted a greater, not a lesser fascination. It certainly berians of the city. Here, the immense work done by its
came far more visible: until then it was possible to cross
officials–as well as its defence of its prerogatives against most of the bridges repeatedly without ever seeing the
other agencies–is amply demonstrated. This book also water, a point Backouche might well have considered!
represents a valuable contribution to the economic his- And since the aesthetic appreciation of water was ditory of Paris, revealing the growth in river trade and the rectly relevant to urban planning, one would expect a
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chapter entitled ’Un nouveau regard sur le fleuve’ (a new were important factors (Backouche mentions medical arway of looking at the river) to devote some space to it.
guments but gives them little emphasis).[3]
While the nature and evolution of the long-term
changes taking place is well documented in La trace du
fleuve, the explanation for them is not clearly articulated.
Much of the argument proceeds through binary oppositions, a common and acceptable explanatory device, but
one that runs the risk of oversimpifying. Many of the
changes are presented in terms of two competing views
of urban space, or as a ’new conception of urban space’
confronting ’old usages’, almost as if the new urbanism
was an explanation in itself. I found myself asking what
was driving the process. Why were these particular solutions adopted? Admittedly, Backouche is sensitive to
political issues, notably the importance of the river in justifying the very existence of the Paris Municipality; and,
after 1800, the rivalry between the Prefect of Police and
the Prefect of the Department of the Seine. At times, too,
she points to financial constraints or the desire to glorify
the monarchy. Yet these are mainly cited as reasons for
the failure of the new views to carry the day immediately.
The principal explanation for the longer-term changes in
policy and planning seems to be the overcrowding of the
river and concern about food supply: Backouche refers
repeatedly to the ’saturation’ of river space (no pun intended, I’m sure!). She demonstrates the growth in certain kinds of activity and the competition for space, yet
given that river activity seems to have continued to grow
in the 1770s and 1780s, after the key urbanistic ideas of
the planners were all in place, it is not clear at what point
’saturation’ was reached or that this was the primary motivation. Nor were their plans by any means confined
to the river. Certainly, in the minds of decision-makers
in the Municipality and the royal government, the interests of commerce were an important consideration. Yet
the merchants themselves have little role in Backouche’s
story, except occasionally in an obstructive role, and they
seem repeatedly to have been pushed aside by engineers
and urban planners, who remain the key actors throughout. The development of capitalism is not part of the explanatory framework-though it could have been, given
what the book reveals about expanding river trade and
growing concentration in certain river industries. And
there is next to nothing in the book about changing social
practices. At the risk of seeming materialist, I would suggest that some of the key changes in Parisian society, not
least the development of an increasingly educated and informed middle class and the changing social practices of
the urban elites (including the medicalisation of society),
The book could have done with a strong editorial
hand. Few readers–even specialists in the history of
Paris–will want to plough through the detail and the multiplication of examples in some sections. Quite a few
of the tables and lengthy quotations, too, do little to
strengthen the argument and could readily be dispensed
with. There are a number of digressions into urbanistic debates–such as that over the rebuilding of the central hospital after a fire-that (as presented here) do not
have a lot to do with the central themes of the book.
In places, too, the prose needs attention: the use of the
phrase ’espace fluvial’, sometimes several times on the
one page, gets very monotonous, and in phrases such as
’l’éclatement de l’espace fluvial’ borders on meaningless.
Nevertheless, I greatly appreciated two aspects of
this book. One–of particular relevance to Paris–is
Backouche’s recognition of the importance both of the
1750s/1760s and of the early nineteenth century as key
turning points in the city’s history. Both periods have
been relatively neglected by historians. The other aspect,
of broader relevance, is its stress on the close rapport between urban geography and urban history. Rivers, along
with other aspects of the natural environment, are often overlooked by urban historians, yet they were central (both literally and figuratively) to the life of cities.
The transformation of the role of the Seine and of official ways of thinking about the river, the debates and the
precocious urbanism that Backouche describes, will be of
interest to those working on many other cities.
[1]. Alain Faure, Paris Carême-prenant Du Carnaval
à Paris au XIXe siècle (Paris, Hachette, 1978).
[2]. Donald Charlton, New Images of the Natural in
France. A Study in European Cultural History, 1750-1800
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984). See also
Rétif de la Bretonne et la Ville (Strasbourg, Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 1993).
(3) Colin Jones, “Pulling Teeth in Eighteenth-Century
Paris”, Past and Present 166 (May 2000): 100-45
Copyright 2001 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net
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Citation: David Garrioch. Review of Backouche, Isabelle, La trace du fleuve. La Seine et Paris (1750-1850). H-Urban,
H-Net Reviews. May, 2001.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=5104
Copyright © 2001 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for
nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication,
originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews
editorial staff at [email protected].
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